CIO Research: The State of Enterprise IT in 2014

IDG Media editor-in-chief, Vijay Ramachandran, shared findings from the State of the CIO 2014 survey. The session highlighted trends in the coming year and provided an indication of the technology roadmap Indian enterprises will take in the next 12 months.  “There’s going to be a phenomenal surge towards the hybrid cloud in 2014,” said Ramachandran. While business critical applications will remain largely within the enterprise, more CIOs are pushing CRM solutions, e-mail and collaboration applications onto the public cloud. On average, over 40 percent of organizations, across sizes and verticals, say they plan to have a hybrid cloud strategy. What’s worrisome though, is that 42 percent of enterprises are unsure of their legal obligations where the cloud is concerned, he said. The other big technology trend was analytics. “There is going to be a lot of thrust on in-memory computing, predictive analytics, social media, and data visualization on mobile devices,” said Ramachandran. Part of the reason for this new found confidence in analytics is that data quality is improving. In fact, poor data quality isn’t among the top 10 barriers hindering the adoption of analytics.  The third big trend centers around mobility. BlackBerry, once the reigning champion of the enterprise is fast losing ground. In the last year, it has lost 20 percentage points in terms of the number of enterprises using it. Its loss is the gain of other players. The ground BlackBerry is losing is being covered by Android and iOS. But the real surprise is the growth of the Windows platform.  Despite the flood of devices entering enterprises, BYOD has not found its calling.  Ramachandran closed the session by underlining the fact that the success of IT projects is now being measured more than ever by business outcomes. More and more CIOs find their budgets being merged with those of the lines of business. He left the audience with the thought that this could be a great way for IT to start conversations with business, to move out of technology’s dungeons and into the business limelight.